Peter Rojas

Yesterday was my last day at AOL. Today I’m joining betaworks as an entrepreneur-in-residence, focusing on seed stage investing, as well as working with portfolio companies here in SF and just generally serving as their ambassador to the West Coast. It’s a big change for me and I’ll write more about it in a later…

I was chatting with Josh Guttman from SoftBank Capital the other day about crowdfunded hardware projects and whether or not a successful campaign made him more likely to invest in a company, as it would presumably provide early validation for product/market fit. His opinion was that there’s minimal correlation between running a successful crowdfunding campaign and building…

After fourteen years in New York, I’m moving back to San Francisco. There was a point not too long ago when I expected I’d live in New York for more or less the rest of my life. I’ve loved living here and I’m not leaving because I’m tired of the city or feel like it’s…

It’s been a few months since my last update on Alpha and it seemed like a good time to share an update on where we’re at and what we’ve been up to. As you might recall, Alpha is the experimental product group that Ryan Block and I help run at AOL that’s charged with coming…

I’m not totally sure what possessed me to create this list, but sometime in 1990, when I was 15 years old, I decided to use the dedicated word processor my parents had bought a few months before to create this list of my CD collection. 

You may have read a bit about Alpha, the new experimental product group at AOL that I’m co-leading with Ryan Block, around the launch of our first mobile app, Pip. Ryan and I talked a little about the purpose behind Alpha in the piece TechCrunch did on Pip, but I thought I’d go into some more…

It’s been almost two years since gdgt was acquired by AOL and I figured I was way overdue for an update on what I’ve been up to. The big news is that Ryan Block and I are running a new group called AOL Alpha that’s charged with building experimental new products. We’ve got an awesome…

A lot was written in the wake of Facebook’s purchase of Oculus Rift last month, but Fred Wilson’s analysis was the one that stayed with me, especially this part here: The next thing was mobile. Mobile is now the last thing. And all of these big tech companies are looking for the next thing to…

There’s lots of talk today in the tech world about ecosystems and how users can get locked into them. Typically what we’re talking about is how consumers can be incentivized to keep buying or using one company or platform’s products and/or services over another company or platform’s because there is some cost in terms of…

As I mentioned on Twitter this morning, I’m still forming my opinion on the Microsoft/Nokia deal, but I can think of one good reason why Microsoft did this: when it comes to mobile their options are to win or to die. Everybody already knows that mobile is the future of computing. For a company like…